


Wake the Morning After

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Aging, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cured Nick, Death, Disease, Drama, F/M, Horror, Marriage, Mithridate, Nick&Nat's Children, Post-Series, Science, Vampire Cure, Vampire Violence, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-16 18:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 14,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4636437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back in the day, Natalie cured Nick's vampirism; they got married. Two decades later, something has gone terribly wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stay in the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelissaTreglia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelissaTreglia/gifts).



> My recipient in this game affiliates as a "Dark N&Ner," so this story runs "darker" (more disturbing vampire behavior and death) than my usual.

Natalie’s cell phone vibrated against her laptop on the conference room table. With an apologetic glance around the afternoon meeting, Ontario’s senior Associate Chief Medical Officer of Health touched her phone’s screen.

“ _Dad’s FLIPPED!_ ” the text yelled. A spiral-eyed emoji gaped at Natalie from beside her daughter’s grinning profile photo. “ _He’s not making ANY sense._ ”

Natalie sighed inwardly. Could you set a phone to differentiate priority notifications from teenage angst? Natalie and Nick had explained to Joan that neither would act as a court of appeal from the other’s parenting decisions anymore; that had been their biggest misstep during their separation. Recently reconciled, both adults were still tiptoeing across the shattered glass of past misunderstandings and mistakes. Natalie wasn’t going to single-handedly pronounce on Joan adopting coyotes, or backpacking Tibet, or whatever the new hobbyhorse might be. The three of them could talk when Natalie got home.

But just as Natalie swiped the notification away, the phone vibrated again: “ _He said to stay in the sunlight. WTH? CM!_ ”

 _Stay in the sunlight_. Natalie felt like she was falling. Two decades crumbled beneath her. She plummeted back through the years, all the triumphs and tragedies, until she landed with a thump on the night a corpse awoke on her autopsy table. “Not so bad,” she’d observed with surprise, for the victim of an IED — still just a “pipe bomb” in those days. Slightly punchy from the unaccustomed night shift, she’d noticed that the deceased man had been handsome and fit, blond and strong-featured, central casting’s ideal heroic bystander trying to stop a robbery. Then her future husband had sprouted fangs and chugged a bag of hemoglobin from the morgue’s cooler. “Something very different from you,” he’d identified himself, with such bitterness and shame...

“Doctor Knight? Natalie?” Doctor Lakshmi Plante, a recent transfer to Natalie’s team, leaned over. “You look a bit green.”

“I— have to take this,” Natalie murmured. “Family.” She tapped her speed-dial as she stood. _Stay in the sunlight_. Three strides took her into the office hallway. “Joan! Honey, where are you?”

“In the driveway! This is brutal, Mom. Dad’s totally lost it.” Joan was pacing; Natalie could hear her daughter’s shoes scuffing angrily. “He closed all the curtains and then opened them again. Well, more like _tore them down_ , and—”

Natalie started down the hall. Her car keys were in her purse at her desk. “What did he say about sunlight? What were his exact words?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Hannah’s mom dropped me off after fencing club. All the curtains were closed and my key wouldn’t turn in the lock. Then Dad opened the door, but he wouldn’t let me in. He stood there, inside, just staring. Then he hugged me and said, ‘ _Jeanne, je t'aime_ ,’ with a weird accent, like when he used to talk to Aunt Janette on the phone. He said, ‘Stay in the sunlight,’ all serious. Then he shut the door in my face and ran around yanking down the curtains. Every window—”

Natalie swallowed. Her desk was just ahead. She and Nick had several emergency codes; this was the oldest, never before used. “Do what he said, hon. Stay in the sun! Okay?”

“Like I have a choice! What’s going on?” The scuffing stopped. Joan whispered, “Is this the neurological stuff, like, cascading all at once? Can that happen? Is this a relapse? A seizure? Should I call an ambulance?”

“No!” Natalie exclaimed, grabbing her purse from her desk and all but running for the stairs. “You’ve got your key to Dad’s Prius with you, right?” That key and a promise had been birthday presents, to go with Joan’s shiny new learner’s permit. They’d also been Nick’s eagerly-awaited excuse to order himself a waitlisted Tesla, a “mid-life crisis” gesture — Natalie rarely thought about that math anymore — that had triggered yet another argument about their present finances and Nick’s convoluted relationship with various funds from his past. The chronic disagreements that had plagued their marriage seemed astonishingly petty and trite, now that the real crisis had come. “And the car’s been plugged in?”

“Yes, and yes. Of course. Mom—”

“This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to the Schankes.”

“I don’t need a babysitter! And you know I don’t have my G2 license yet.”

“Listen to me, Joan Richelle Knight.” Natalie stepped into the stark white stairwell. The fire door clunked behind her as she raced down the steps. “I’m giving you a choice. You can go see Myra first and have her drive you downtown, or you can drive yourself straight to Captain Schanke’s office. I don’t care which, as long as you leave now and _stay in the sun_. Hear me?”

“Mom, you’re scaring me.”

“Good!” Natalie’s eyes stung. She grabbed the handrail and paused for one deep breath.

Twenty-some years ago, shortly before Captain Stonetree had retired and the homicide squad had relocated to the 96th precinct, everything had come together in the quest to make Nick human again. Pieces found, puzzle assembled; cure administered, case closed. The years immediately after, while Nick’s reflexes, instincts and immune system had slowly adjusted to his mortal reality, had been often embarrassing and sometimes harrowing. But once Nick had had confidence that he really could live and love as a human being, he’d asked Natalie to share that life and love. She’d accepted.

Yet Nick had never stopped looking over his shoulder, never stopped expecting an ambush by the existence he’d left behind. Nick had told Natalie about many such dangers — his resentful surviving converts; hunters of vampires; cronies of Nick’s deceased “master,” Lacroix; and, first, foremost and always, the Enforcers, who kept the vampires’ secrets. Natalie understood, intellectually, that no matter how much Nick had told her, there would always be more that he hadn’t; it was the sheer volume of eight centuries. And she was his wife, not his confessor. But part of her resented it, even so. Especially right now, running blindfolded into danger.

In the stairwell, Natalie blotted angry, anxious tears with the sleeve of her plum pantsuit and hurried on. “I’m on my way now, Joan. I need you to tell Captain Schanke — and only him, all right? — what’s happened. If I don’t report in before sunset, I want him to burn our house to the ground.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You heard me. He’ll understand. If he’s already— if you can’t get to Captain Schanke for any reason, I want you to call your Aunt Janette.”

“I thought she wasn’t speaking to us since Dad turned down her alternative medicine thing.”

That is, since Nick chose living with a presently incurable, progressively degenerative, auto-immune disease over returning to vampirism as Janette’s convert. Janette had not appreciated the implicit judgment. And Natalie had wavered on Nick’s behalf, herself; surely sun, food and sex were a small price to pay for his perfect, immortal health? Nick had looked at Natalie with such desolation, such betrayal... and then she’d remembered what vampirism had made of her brother, Richard, and bitten her tongue.

Natalie’s thoughts now beat out the disturbingly ingrained rhythm of vampirism’s double-truths and half-lies. She addressed Joan: “If everything falls apart here, Janette can—” _wipe your memory, erase us, spare you from the Enforcers’ Code_ “—tell you what you need to know.”

“This is crazy.” Joan hissed. “This is like that TV show where the parents are spies. This isn’t real. Mom, you’re not—”

“I love you. Your dad loves you. Now get in the car and get to Captain Schanke. _In the sun_.”

Natalie shoved her phone into her purse and opened the door at the bottom of the stairwell. She found Doctor Plante waiting for her in the lobby.

“I thought I’d offer you a ride.” Lakshmi held up her keys. “Hospital? School?”

“That’s very kind.” Natalie hauled out a diplomatic smile. Lakshmi had had to complete a lot of travel for her previous team just as she’d started on Natalie’s, and she kept trying to make up for it. Natalie had told her it wasn’t necessary. “I’m just headed home to Vaughan. If you could make my excuses to the team, that would be a huge favor! I still haven’t figured out the bluetooth car mode for this phone.”

“Are you sure?” Lakshmi pressed. “We’re all rooting for you and Professor Knight — Nick — you know.”

Natalie blinked, nonplussed at the image of her colleagues discussing her vampire situation… her marital situation… oh! but of course her coworkers knew about Nick’s medical situation. What they didn’t know was how little any of them could afford a witness. Witnesses were the Enforcers’ mania, phobia and _raison d'etre_. “Thank you, but I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“Well… okay. See you tomorrow?”

Natalie waved non-committally on her way out the front doors and into the early-autumn sunlight. The sun should shield her right up to her own home. Right up to whatever had attacked Nick.


	2. Tread the Long Road

Natalie wasn’t much for prayer. Religion was on Nick’s chore list in their marriage. But as she floored her car’s accelerator, every breath entreated Anyone listening. Exhale, _please_ for Nick. Inhale, _please_ for Joan.

With Natalie’s mind everywhere but on the road, Toronto’s other drivers were lucky that she could follow this route by muscle memory. She’d made this commute countless times since she and Nick had bought their house, in what had then been the boondocks of Vaughan and was now sardined with McMansions. If Natalie had been in Nick’s coming-soon Tesla, the speed limit would have run up a white flag, but she gave it all her Honda had.

“Stay in the sunlight” wasn’t the signal to summon the cavalry. It didn’t mean to come as fast as you could, or to stand together. “Stay in the sunlight” was the watchword to stay away. It’s already too late. Save yourself.

Surely Nick knew her better than that?

Recently, Natalie had felt as if she and Nick hardly knew each other at all. But back when they’d first found the cure for vampirism, it had seemed to Natalie as if they had already known each other for a lifetime. Really, it had been just three years: her twenty-eighth birthday to her thirty-first, his eight-hundred-and-somethingth to his eight-hundred-and-somethingth-else. But that third year! Her brother Richard’s death. The psychopath who had called himself Roger Jamison. The mayoral election Barbara Norton had lost. It had seemed the end of a very long road to Natalie as well as to Nick when Nick’s old friend Lili, a professor at the _Freie Universität Berlin_ , had called to say that she thought she had it. The cure.

“It’s not the _Abarat_ ,” Lili had cautioned when she’d arrived in person with information too sensitive to share any other way.

“It’s better than the _Abarat_ ,” Nick had said. Lili had unearthed a transliterated Sanskrit compounding recipe from a scientific enchiridion in a first-century BCE Brāhmī script. Lili’s research had revealed the prescription as a kind of mithridate, the semi-legendary antidote for all poisons, here tailored to counteract the venom by which vampires — _vetāla_ in Hindu mythology — spread their cursed state.

“Of course it is not quite that easy.” Lili had pursed her lips. “I have linguistically mapped all but one of this antidote’s ingredients to known elements, extracts and admixtures. That one is ‘solar kyphi.’ Kyphi was a kind of Egyptian incense, or perhaps ‘aroma therapy,’ as we might say today. You would not have heard of the ‘solar’ kyphi—”

“I have, actually,” Nick had said. “A globetrotting Byzantine physician named Paulus Aegineta noted that solar kyphi had thirty-six ingredients, compared to the twenty-eight of its lunar counterpart. He didn’t bother to share the recipes, though.” Nick had grinned at Natalie’s surprise. “I’ve been looking into this for a while, you know.”

“So we’ve got an equation with a variable,” Natalie had summed up the situation. “Let’s solve for ‘x’!”

A honking horn yanked Natalie back to the present. Swerving, she returned to her own lane. Then she put on her blinker and waited her turn. But once she merged, she fell into her memories again. The enemy had to be there, in their past, with the cure that had changed everything for them… and not only them.

Natalie had worked to reverse-engineer solar kyphi from biochemical analysis of the other ingredients. Nick had plunged back into his beloved archaeology and anthropology. Together, they’d hunted solar kyphi as doggedly as they’d pursued murderers as a forensic pathologist and homicide detective. 

The more tests Natalie had run, the more this mithridate had looked like it could fortify the blood-brain barrier against the excess RNA nucleotides that Natalie had dubbed the “vampire virus.” Nick’s hopes had risen so high that Natalie had feared another crash, like the Twelve Steps incident. But the compound had lacked a catalyst. Armed with models of the traits that the catalyst must have, Natalie had uncovered an obscure drug that she had hoped could substitute for the missing solar kyphi.

“It’s highly experimental,” Natalie had told Nick. “It, hmm — how can I put this delicately — enhances beef production. I would never have heard of it at this early stage in its testing without the solar kyphi modeling. Now, Lydovuterine-B is cytotoxic and acts something like an endorphin, but—”

“But if I accept the risk, you may be able to cure me.”

They had come so close, then. Heartbreakingly, Lydovuterine suppressed vampirism, but didn’t cure it. And the side-effects made Natalie shudder to this day.

Luckily, Nick had already hit an alternative lead. It had become his lifeline up from the Lydovuterine disappointment. A forgotten drawer in Cairo had held small jars retrieved from Philae — one of the supposed burial sites of Osiris — before the Old Aswan Dam had flooded it in 1902. One jar, just one, had remained intact. 

“I joke about amateur grave-robbing,” Nick had said, presenting the hermetically sealed jar to Natalie. “But this is the first time in a while that I’ve really been on the wrong side of justice. Today’s antiquities laws are right not to let this out of Egypt!” His eyes had gone distant, unfocused. “A friend left her research to me long before any of those laws came into effect. I gave the opened jars to the authorities with all the provenances...”

Natalie had snorted. “If you won’t tell the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, I won’t, either.” She had carefully extracted a sample and subjected it to every test in the book, plus a few that would get the book burned if the Enforcers found them there.

And so solar kyphi had proved to be mithridate’s catalyst. Once Natalie had certified the formula, Nick had abstained completely from all blood long enough for his mithridate-revived human immune system to purge the excess RNA nucleotides and start producing its own healthy corpuscles again.

Should they have left it there? Natalie asked herself, as she sped toward home and whatever had invaded it. Would that have been right, to cure Nick and call it quits? As far as Nick and Janette knew — from their deceased “master,” Lacroix, and other sources — nothing in the Code prohibited the cure itself, only humans knowing that something existed to be cured. If Nick, then leaving law enforcement and returning to university, and Natalie, then switching to day-shift and applying for a promotion, had just feigned forgetting...

But neither Nick nor Natalie could turn away from others suffering as Nick had. Quietly, discreetly, they’d shared the cure first with Nick’s mistaken convert Serena, who had wanted a child, not an eternity in the night. Later, Nick’s friend Feliks had also asked for the cure. After losing her vampire family to the fever, a pretty young woman named Urs had sought them out. Few and far between, every several years, a disillusioned vampire would arrive, cautious but determined, and the tiny stock of solar kyphi would dwindle.

The reality of a cure passed by word of mouth. Around hints. In whispers. Behind closed doors. Yet loose lips sink ships. The Enforcers honored no statute of limitations.

Natalie pulled her car into her own driveway and shook herself back to the present.

The Prius was gone: good. Joan had left her fencing gear piled on the front porch: not good, but not something that worried Natalie at the moment. The sun was sliding slowly down the afternoon side of the sky: running out of time did worry her.

 _Stay in the sunlight_ worried her. 

Natalie went straight to the storage shed out back. Past the rakes, shovels and assorted remains of Nick and Joan’s various enthusiasms, Natalie had eyes only for the unremarkable shelf of commonplace plastic totes. As she and Nick had drilled long ago, Natalie got out the skeleton key and custom garlic spray. She took one wooden stake in hand and tucked another in her waistband. 

Briefly, Natalie wished that Nick had let Joan join archery rather than fencing, after all, when she had first been excited over those post-apocalyptic game-show books; an arrow’s range sounded really good right now. But of course Natalie wouldn’t herself know how to use a bow any more than she could handle one of Joan’s foils, and a sport arrow was probably fiberglass instead of wood, anyway. Besides, the look on Nick’s face as he’d struggled with deeply internalized, utterly anachronistic class issues had been priceless. Professor Nick Knight was delighted to support his daughter’s athleticism in any venue; Sir Nicolas de Brabant would darn well equip his heir with a noble’s arms, not a peasant’s.

Closing the tote, Natalie hesitated over the necklace with the crucifix pendant. She’d never been able to account for such effects as other than psychosomatic. The only vampire on whom she’d witnessed it work was Nick, and he … well, he believed. Her brother Richard, as a vampire, had batted her out of the way like a rag doll while she held Joan of Arc’s own cross. Granted, Richard had perhaps gone out of his way to not touch the relic itself. Natalie fastened the symbol around her neck.

In a moment, she was at her own back door. With a deep breath, Natalie stepped inside. Out of the sunlight.


	3. Plumb the Utter Depths

“Nick?” Natalie called. She knew better than to try to sneak up on vampires. Sound, smell, disruptions in the Force or whatever uncanny sixth sense: they knew she was here. But for all she knew, Nick could be hiding somehow, or captive, or… dead. Act now, feel later, Natalie chided herself. “Joan’s safe. Where are you?”

Looking around the kitchen and dining room, Natalie saw that Joan had been right. Someone had ripped down the curtains, rods and all. The low afternoon sun streamed in on an odd mess of discarded food; someone had eaten a few bites of everything and finished nothing. In Natalie’s experience, vampires never voluntarily ate human food. The family’s pets did, but they rarely stopped at a few bites.

“Nick?” If this were a negotiation, Natalie believed that she could extract them. She’d faced down vampires before. If it were an execution... Schanke would contain it.

Ironically, Nick had told his former partner about vampirism only after that knowledge had become extraneous. It had been just when Nick, cured, had resigned from the force, when that lab technician, Jeff Morris, had tried to frame Nick for Morris’s vigilante murders of drug dealers by stealing and planting Nick’s engraved watch — inexplicably, Morris had admitted to the murders, but not to the frame. Natalie had never understood Nick’s decision to read Schanke in at just that time. Much less did she grasp Schanke’s willingness to believe once all the evidence of Nick’s former condition was gone. But she was grateful now to have an ally on whom to depend.

Janette was an ally on whom _not_ to depend, Natalie thought. Janette preferred it that way.

Wooden stake in one hand and garlic spray in the other, Natalie moved into the living room. Here, too, the drapes had been yanked down, the rods knocked askew, but no other signs of struggle appeared. Natalie glimpsed herself in the big mirror above the tan couch, opposite the bare windows. Later, perhaps, she might grin at the sight she made, a slightly plump bureaucrat in her fifties creeping around cushions and drapes, seeking her equally mature, equally bland, academic husband... loaded for vampires. Later. She hoped.

Around the corner from the living room to the hallway, Natalie stopped cold and swallowed hard. The St. Bernard dog and Siamese cat weren’t just sleeping. She knelt, expecting two neat little holes through which each pet would have lost its life. Instead, lacerations and trauma confronted her, almost obscuring the holes that, yes, explained the exsanguination. She measured the distance between the fang marks on her forefinger: male, or a very large female. Hadn’t Nick said that Enforcers tended to be physically imposing?

“Nick?” Natalie kept her voice steady. “I’ve found Hagrid and Miss Scarlet.”

Natalie cleared the rest of the windowed rooms in short order. Besides the curtains down everywhere, the house seemed almost untouched. An exception was Nick’s medicine cabinet, torn off the wall and smashed. Bottles of interferon beta-1A jumbled with those of nabiximols, sildenafil citrate and every kind of ibuprofen available in Canada. Natalie almost stepped on Nick’s glasses on the bathmat. She picked them up; the metal frames were bent and the plastic lenses cracked. Her hand shook. She slid them inside her pantsuit’s breast pocket; they steadied her.

That left the basement. The windowless basement. With the hidden safe holding the remaining solar kyphi, Natalie’s documentation of the mithridate cure, and the anonymized records of each patient who had taken it. If this were the Enforcers, not a private vendetta against Nick, that safe would be the target.

Would she trade it — all her patients’ safety — for Nick’s? Could he forgive her if she did? Could she forgive herself?

Back in the hallway, before the door to the downstairs, Natalie looked up at a Knight family portrait on the wall. The studio photograph had been taken a few years ago, after Nick had gotten glasses but before he’d used a cane, after Natalie had cut her hair but before she’d stopped dying it. Joan still had her braces in the portrait, and a headband strove futilely to tame her mass of tawny curls. Looking at this picture, Nick had once commented, in a peculiar, pensive mood, that it was lucky Joan had inherited Natalie’s hair type, if not its color, because it made Joan look less like his sister, Fleur. What was lucky about that, Natalie had never discovered. Now, Natalie touched the frame the way that Nick sometimes touched statues at church.

Then she opened the door, flipped on the light and descended the stairs.

“Nick?” Natalie tried again.

A growl came from the still-unfinished part of the basement. Natalie flinched and headed for it, past the laundry room and the rec room, carefully not looking at where the safe was hidden. Natalie held the stake and garlic spray ready. She almost tripped over Nick’s cane, tossed across the hall.

“I thought I told you to stay away, Nat.” Nick’s voice was deep and lazy. It made Natalie shiver. That tone belonged in happy, intimate moments, not in this disaster. “‘Stay in the sunlight.’ Or did Joan misquote me?”

“Are you all right?” Natalie asked. “Who’s with you?”

“It really is too dangerous for you, here, Nat. But I’m glad you didn’t listen, this time.” Nick laughed, low and smooth. The laugh somehow both fascinated and repelled. “Not that you ever do.”

Natalie edged around the corner. She gasped.

Steel police handcuffs chained Nick’s right wrist to a loop of exposed rebar, where he and she had long planned to add a wall. His eyes burned vampiric gold. In accommodating khaki slacks and a collared shirt, he stood easily, gracefully, as if age and disease had never turned his body against him. Observing her shock through eyes that no longer needed the glasses in her pocket, Nick smiled, slowly. Fangs glistened between his lips.

“Ah, yes.” Nick inhaled deeply through his nose. “You’ll be interested to know, scientifically, that draining Hagrid and Miss Scarlet didn’t make me a carouche. It’s still human blood for me. Yours, if you get any closer. I always did want your blood, Natalie Lambert Knight. I can’t remember how I resisted taking it for so long. I can hardly remember why.”

“Stop it.” Natalie looked quickly around the unfinished space; they were alone. “This isn’t funny.”

“You’re right.” Nick jerked his cuffed hand. The rebar held. The cuffs bent, but not enough to release him. His wrist bled; he licked it clean. “This isn’t funny.”

“Who did this to you, Nick?” Surely not Janette: as much as she disapproved of Nick’s choice, she respected Nick’s right to make the choice. But who else wanted Nick to be a vampire again?

Nick’s laugh was deathly. “You. God. Fate. What’s the difference?” With his free hand, Nick pulled open his shirt collar. “See, no holes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The mithridate wore off, Nat!” Nick hissed through his fangs. “Or my meds or my disease neutralized it, I don’t know. Is this special Hell for all of us who dreamed of humanity, or just for me? It’s all back, all of it, the _hunger_ —” Nick cried out in anguish and turned his face to the drywall.

Natalie dropped her stakes and garlic spray on a card table. She stepped toward Nick.

“No! Get out of here! I can’t control it. When I get loose, I’ll kill you.”

“ _No_.” She took another step. “We beat this once. We’ll beat it again.”

“This isn’t where we started before, Nat. This isn’t a hundred years of animal blood under my belt! This is the very first time that I tried to go without human blood, and—” Nick shuddered. His voice faded. “And I can’t.”


	4. Lie Down with Lions

Nick squared his shoulders and stood tall. He turned to face Natalie and extended his free left hand, inviting her to take it.

Then his eyes swirled a redder gold. His voice slid again into the deep, lazy croon that had shaken her before, and she could feel the vampire behind the words: “Here you are, bringing your blood to me. I know that you’ve wanted this, too, Nat. I know what you’ve imagined. We can make it all happen. We can do everything you—”

“Stop it!” Natalie crossed her arms. Yes, she’d shared fantasies with her husband, but she’d never wanted it like this; nothing like this. “You’re better than this, Nick.”

“I am exactly this!” He snarled, jerking his hand back to thump his stalled heart. “Aren’t you the one who told me that I should take what Janette offered? Be healthy, strong and immortal again, if not young? The hunger isn’t just for human blood, Nat! It’s for the hunt, the kill, the delicious defeat in the prey’s fleeing, dying, mortal heart. Right now, I want to—”

“Hurt me? Kill me?” Natalie threw her chin up.

Nick closed his reddened eyes and turned away again, his shoulders slumping. He grabbed on to the rebar with both hands. “You brought wooden stakes. Use one. Through the heart.”

“Don’t be stupid, Nick.”

“Do it before I get too close to you or Joan or anyone else. I can’t be this again.”

Cautiously, Natalie skirted Nick, scrutinizing the rebar and cuffs, his pallor and vigor, the anguish on his face and blood on his shirt. In some ways, her husband now looked more like her mental image of him than he had in years; lines etched and bowed by physical pain again ran smooth and straight. Even his silvered-gold hair looked somehow thicker than it had before, his middle-aged stoutness somehow more strapping. But the yoke of his self-disgust had returned, too.

Natalie had never had any reason to suspect that mithridate could wear off. The data showed that mithridate stopped replication of the extra RNA nucleotides, as well as preventing legacy nucleotides from crossing the blood-brain barrier during the transition. Could the pathogen have persisted in some dormant reservoir? Could Nick’s blasted auto-immune disease have set it loose? It was one thing if they just needed a new batch of mithridate and a month’s total abstinence from blood: been there, done that, have the solar kyphi. But if mithridate itself were no longer effective, then they were back not only to where they had started, together, twenty-some years ago, with Nick’s refrigerator of steer blood, but apparently to where Nick had started by himself, over a hundred years ago, when he swore off killing — or even four-hundred years ago, when Nick had first defied Lacroix by refusing to take the blood of the innocent.

Nick’s free arm sprang out and grabbed Natalie, yanking her against him and pinning her back to his chest.

Natalie shrieked. She struggled. But she couldn’t break free, and the stakes and garlic were a world away.

“Tsk-tsk. One step too close,” the vampire breathed against her hair. “Curiosity killed the Nat. Fitting, isn’t it?” He kissed her jaw and neck, progressing slowly in a sickening parody of their real closeness. She tried to elbow him; he adjusted his grip, inhaling deeply again. “So many, many days, alone in my bed, I dreamed of your blood. My beautiful, mortal Natalie and her blessed, human blood.” She felt his cold fangs against her skin. “I imagined every way of taking it, taking you. I hated myself for most of them. But you know what? That didn’t stop me dreaming. Again and again and again. Do you want me to tell you about them now? Do you want to pick one?” He pressed his lips against her lips, and then against her temple with a low laugh when she twisted her face away.

“You can be human again.” Natalie feigned calmness. Make yourself look big to a mountain lion; back slowly away from a bear; stand up to a vampire until he sees a fellow predator, not prey. “You know mithridate works. You just have to want it.”

“With your veins right here, right under me, right now?” The vampire licked her neck and pulled her more tightly against him.

Far in the back of her mind, Natalie noted that sildenafil was another medication Nick definitely didn’t need as a vampire; in the front of her mind, she recognized that his focus was shifting. She seized her moment, working one hand up to the necklace she wore. Natalie jammed the crucifix pendant onto the back of Nick’s free hand and held firm as his skin erupted in flames.

The vampire howled. His grip slackened until his entire arm fell limp at his side.

Natalie ran for the card table where she’d set her stakes and garlic spray. Panting from the strain more than the exertion, she turned back to Nick with the flimsy table between them and found him staring at the cross-shaped brand burned deep into a hand he could evidently no longer lift. Slowly, he sat down on the concrete floor. His cuffed arm extended up the wall over his head; his branded hand draped across his lap.

When Nick looked up at Natalie at last, his fangs were gone and his blue eyes looked as lost as she’d ever seen them. “How can you forgive me?”

Natalie’s legs wobbled. She sank down to sit on the floor, too, looking straight across at her husband from under the little table. “Welcome back.”

“Natalie—”

“Later.” She raised a hand to her heart in promise; there would be a later for the apologies, anguish and succor, for them both. “First things first. Protein shakes aren’t going to cut it, are they?”

One corner of Nick’s mouth twitched. “I’m afraid not.”

“Can I call your old butcher friend about bovine blood? His son took over for him, I remember.” Natalie took a deep breath. She didn’t like to add this, but only Nick knew what it was like at this moment, inside his body with the vampire. Only he could make this decision. “Or do you need me to go to Janette for human? I know that she’s not in the business any more, but she’ll have her own.”

“If I feed… that just delays a new mithridate dose taking effect, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” Pride in Nick’s response warred with remorse for her part in the cure’s failure. What had she overlooked? Natalie shook her head. “But until we know what went wrong, we can’t assume that a fresh dose would necessarily be the equivalent of a booster shot. We need to run tests. Lots and lots of tests.” Natalie dropped her eyes. “And, well, there’s Hagrid and Miss Scarlet.”

Nick groaned. Both Nick and Natalie were silent, remembering the beloved pets to whom they had certainly owed better. When their eyes met, Natalie knew that they were both also thinking: at least it had been the pets, not Joan. Too close. Much too close. Eventually, Nick asked, “How am I going to tell her?”

“You won’t have to tonight. I sent her to Don and Myra; I’ll ask them to keep her over.” Natalie looked at her watch; she’d left her phone in her purse. “And I need to make that call pretty quickly. I assumed it was the Enforcers, or maybe Alexandra, Thomas or Jack the Ripper, not...”

“My own worst enemy?”

Natalie raised her eyebrows. “I told Joan to give Schanke the code. He’ll raze our house if I don’t check in by sunset.”

“Thank God for Schanke.” Nick looked down at the cross branded on his hand, and then up again at Natalie. “You should have taken Joan to him yourself, Nat. You shouldn’t have had to face this.”

Natalie stood. Emotionally exhausted, she just held up her left hand to display the wedding band that she’d had Nick put back on her after their separation; as far as she knew, he’d never removed his. “Steer or human?”

Nick swallowed. “Steer. Lots and lots of steer.”


	5. Have Power to Release

“Are you ready?” Natalie showed Nick the key to the cuffs. “The curtains are all back up and pinned closed.”

“I’ve got to admit that I want a shower and a soft bed almost as much as— well.” Nick raised his cuffed hand and looked at it as if it weren’t part of him. His blue eyes overflowed with worry when he turned them back to Natalie. “But it’ll be safer for you and Joan if I stay like this.”

“Safer yet if none of us ever got out of those soft beds. And yet.”

It had been a night and a day since Natalie had found Nick, a vampire again, in their basement. A short break from headlong coping had eventually given Natalie the opportunity to exchange her suit for jeans and a magenta sweatshirt, and to grab a nap in their bedroom; Nick still wore yesterday’s clothes, and his nap — if he’d actually slept; Natalie wasn’t sure — had come sitting against the basement wall with pillows and blankets.

Nick had begun tanking up on the bovine blood as soon as it had arrived, courtesy of Nick’s old butcher’s testimony to his son and a lavish tip to the delivery driver. Natalie had been surprised, though she immediately recognized that she shouldn’t have been, to learn that cow blood didn’t come neatly in green glass bottles; it turned out that Nick had usually filled those himself, using a funnel and a gravy boat. Natalie had maneuvered lidded buckets of the stuff downstairs one at a time. After opening the first, she had run back up to the kitchen for a ladle and glassware, wiping away furious tears at how vampirism stole Nick’s human dignity, no matter how hard he tried to hold on to it.

Nick had downed the bovine blood with an appetite that neither of them wanted to discuss. In the old days, Natalie wouldn’t have allotted him that much in a month, even before they knew for sure that humanity lay on the other side of stone-cold abstinence through the mithridate cure. But Nick’s self-control, for the moment, waited at the bottom of a bottle.

Natalie could only be grateful that he had not taken her up on her offer to get him human blood. She would have done it. But a Nick who could have asked it of her would not have been the same man who had walked into the sunlight holding her hand two decades ago.

“You’ve done every test you can think of?”

“I’ve taken samples for every test I can think of,” Natalie corrected. She had run a complete battery of physiological and biochemical evaluations, everything that she used to measure back when Nick and she were first seeking the cure, and also some things she’d discovered with her rare later vampire patients. “For some, I’m going to have to beg time on the electron microscope at the Institute, and pull in favors at the Coroner’s Building and Mercy Hospital. But yes, everything looks normal — for a vampire.”

“All right then.” Nick closed his eyes and extended his cuffed hand.

Natalie unlocked the restraint, wryly amused that this simple act seemed to stress Nick more than all the medical poking and prodding she’d put him through. She really had trained him as a guinea pig back in the day, hadn’t she? She set the cuff on the card table. “All done.”

Nick offered her a weak smile while rubbing his freed wrist. That lasted bare seconds; suddenly, with a strangled sound, he rushed past her and pounded up the stairs. She could hear each hit of his feet against the steps at first, but then she heard a whoosh of air and — nothing. Following at a normal pace, Natalie guessed that he’d taken to the air. She had to remember, he could fly again, and hypnotize, and withstand bullets… and laugh in the face of devastating auto-immune diseases. Natalie knew that Nick didn’t want to be a vampire again. She knew why. But, oh, to keep him healthy and strong! Was humanity really worth what Nick was willing to pay for it?

Natalie found Nick in a corner of their living room. He gazed out from the shadows through a crack he’d opened at the far end of the drapes over the window, a peek out into the wider daylight world. It was as close as he could get until sunset. Not taking his eyes from the shaft of sun, Nick acknowledged Natalie with a shrug. “After Damietta, you know.”

“Damietta,” Natalie repeated. That was the site of one of the campaigns that Nick had fought as a Crusader, when he was Sir Nicolas de Brabant, long before Janette and Lacroix had found him and made him a vampire. Nick’s side had lost the final battle at Damietta, that much Natalie remembered. “Was Damietta the one with the mud?”

“Yeah.” Nick was silent for several moments. “It’s where I was captured.”

Natalie breathed in sharply. She went straight to Nick and burrowed into his embrace, pressing her cheek against his once again slow, cold heart. She’d known, of course, that Nick had been a prisoner of war. He’d spent a year chained in a Saracen cellar, his hopes of ransom fading, increasingly sure that he’d been abandoned. Finally, during a fire, he’d escaped. Those memories must run even deeper than, and almost as dark as, his vampirism. Natalie hadn’t made the connection. “Oh, Nick, I didn’t think—”

“It’s okay.” He kissed the top of her head. “I don’t want you to have to.”

Natalie imagined Nick bringing himself to close that cuff on his wrist, forcing himself to throw the key out of his reach. That long-past year in chains must have blazed behind his eyes as if it were only yesterday, burning through every motion, eclipsed only by eight centuries of vampirism. No wonder his despair had reached such depths, so quickly. “I always thought, when you stared out windows this way, you were looking at the sun.”

“I am. The sun, freedom — kind of the same thing, for me.”

They stayed in each other’s arms, watching, waiting, sharing what solace they could in the ruins of the life they’d built. Reality intruded all too soon. Natalie heard one of Nick’s rare heartbeats. When his blood moved, Nick stiffened and gently pushed her away.

He went for another tall glass of cow.


	6. See how Others Strove

“Any luck with the list?” Nick asked Natalie, pausing his vigorous raking of their fenced back lawn under the waxing moon. The chore didn’t need doing yet, but Nick needed a task now.

“No, and I’m beginning to worry.” Natalie sent an answer to yet one more email from Doctor Lakshmi Plante and then closed her work laptop. She stood up from her patio chair to stretch. The moonlight softened the early autumn night, but Natalie had also brought out a camping lantern so that she and Nick could work side by side. “I’ve left multiple messages for Serena, Feliks, almost everyone. Urs’s last number is disconnected, but it’s strange that none of the others are calling back.”

“What are you saying to them?” Nick resumed raking.

“Pretty much just ‘remember me? call me back ASAP.’” Natalie looked down at the patio table where, besides the laptop and lantern, she’d arrayed her and Nick’s cell phones, the house landline on a long cord, industrial quantities of Diet Coke, and a paper notebook. Paper could be stolen only, not also hacked. She had to assume that the Enforcers had the best engineers that immortality could buy.

Hit by a sudden feeling of unease, Natalie pushed her work laptop to the edge of the table, as far from her research notebook as it could go. Most of Natalie’s team was taking her personal emergency in stride, pulling her in only when they really needed her, but Lakshmi seemed to want to be in constant contact. Granted, Lakshmi did always ask after Nick with genuine interest before tossing on more work minutiae that didn’t quite require Natalie’s intervention, or offering to pick up projects that Natalie saw no solid reason to give her; Natalie appreciated the concern, at least.

Nick’s allergy to sunlight had been so well documented in his days as a homicide detective — even on that _Cop Watch_ episode — that no one had questioned its sudden re-emergence as an outgrowth of his relentlessly idiosyncratic auto-immune disorder. Classes hadn’t actually begun yet at Nick’s university, so it was seamless to his new students that a couple of adjunct professors — grateful for the extra sessions, both in their paychecks and on their _curricula vitae_ — would be taking over for him for this term. His department had sent flowers; his department chair had sent a faint, possibly illegal, hint that early retirement has its attractions.

Joan was understandably angry that her parents were making her stay with the Schankes, because it obviously meant that there was something they weren’t telling her, either about Nick’s relapse or the deaths of their pets. She wasn’t buying that they were spies, she’d informed them both. Don had brought her over this evening to see Nick, as well as to pick up more clothes and her fencing gear, and she’d seemed temporarily appeased when she could find nothing new wrong with her father besides the bandages on his left hand.

After Joan had left with Don, Nick had taken off his glasses, set aside his cane, and plunged into a heartsick funk, until deciding that yardwork was the answer.

Natalie asked him, “Am I being too vague? In the messages?”

“No. You can’t risk anything that shouldn’t be heard by those who protect their — our — secrets.”

“Even though this really doesn’t concern them?”

“They think that everything concerns them.” Nick raked a particularly fierce swipe. The metal rakehead at the end of the long, wooden handle twisted and snapped, its flimsy tines trapped implausibly deep in the sod. Nick held up the broken end; with the sheared metal clamp that had held the rakehead, he now had a pike or bayonet instead of a rake.

“Don’t know your own strength?” Natalie teased very gently.

“Leverage,” Nick grinned sheepishly. He dug out the metal rakehead and brought it and the wooden handle over to the patio, leaning them by the back door. “Think of it this way. If it’s just my disease or meds that counteracted the mithridate, nothing has changed for anyone except us. But if the mithridate is wearing off, then I was first because I took it first. It will hit all the others down the line, one by one.”

Natalie nodded. She’d considered whether the vampire virus could have evolved around the mithridate instead, but in that case Nick would have had to have been re-exposed, and he hadn’t been bitten. “If it is wearing off and the others aren’t warned, it could happen to someone in the sun.”

“It could happen in the sun in front of a camera.” Nick paced around the patio. “That’s the possibility that brings it all tumbling down. The selfie to end all selfies. Empirical evidence gone viral. They — we — can’t hypnotize someone who has empirical evidence. It would be the end of their world — their empire.”

“While the other possibilities are our problems only?” Natalie opened another Diet Coke. She wasn’t the least bit nocturnal anymore; she needed caffeine to carry a night shift.

Natalie’s cell phone buzzed; the number was unrecognized. Natalie and Nick both sat down in the patio chairs and leaned over the device. Natalie answered, putting it on speaker. “This is Doctor Natalie Lambert Knight. Who’s calling, please?”

“Hello. You’ve been trying to reach Serena?” The woman’s voice shaped the English words with a French geometry. “My name is Veronique Martin. I apologize if this is too late to phone.”

“It’s fine,” Natalie said. “Is Serena all right? She and my husband are, uh, related. We have family medical news for her.”

“I am terribly sorry to have to tell you this, Doctor Knight.” Veronique’s voice hitched. “But Serena died almost a month ago. I have custody of Chloé and Clément. If there is family news for them… I did not realize that Serena was still in touch with any of her relations. I would have let you know sooner.”

“I’m so sorry,” Natalie said. Nick looked stricken. “So, so sorry.” Natalie reached out for Nick’s hand and he grabbed on. “I met Serena in person only a few times, but I admired her. I know my husband thought she was one of the most remarkable people he ever knew.”

“Yes, she was remarkable. She was magnificent.” Veronique snorted. “This is where so many people say, ‘at least you have the children.’ Please don’t say that.”

“I won’t,” Natalie promised, dismayed. If they cured Nick again and his disease eventually overwhelmed him, would people say that at least she had Joan? Had people said that to Sara when Richard had died? “But I have to ask: how did Serena die?”

Nick’s grip on Natalie’s hand tightened enough to bruise.


	7. Change as Others Do

“The detectives have not concluded their investigation,” Veronique said, dully.

The call went silent, the kind of silence that always made Natalie wonder whether a cell connection had dropped. You never wondered that on a landline. Then she heard a defiant huff.

“The reporters called it ‘spontaneous human combustion.’ You can Google the newspapers,” Veronique said. “Serena had not been feeling well. The day was so hot, nothing would stay down, and a migraine kept her in a dark room. When the evening cooled before sunset, she felt a little better, and we went out for ice cream, the four of us...”

“Strange things are not so strange in this family.”

“Perhaps, indeed.” Veronique took a deep breath. “The very sunlight set her ablaze. There was smoke, and fire before we could react to the smoke, and then she was gone. Her clothes, her shoes, her phone and keys left behind, but not a patch of skin or lock of hair. We saw it, the children and I, but no one else. The authorities think us mad with grief.”

“I’m so sorry.” That was all Natalie could say that would not tip off a wire-tapping Enforcer. Even ‘I believe you’ might be too much. Natalie wished that she could question Veronique in person. Whether she realized it or not, did she know anything of Serena’s vampiric past? Of the cure? Of what had gone so terribly, terribly wrong? “Can we exchange contact information? Nick and I will send you a letter for the children. Perhaps we can meet.”

By the time Natalie got off her phone with Veronique, Nick had already looked up relevant news articles on his. Red tear tracks streaked his face, even as his vampire physiology strove to reabsorb that blood.

“No photos, no footage,” he confirmed. “Small mercies, I suppose. If they think that she was a vampire all along, it sounds like a suicide: stepping straight into the sun.”

“What if they know she’d been human?”

“Humans die,” Nick mocked bitterly. “Does it matter how or when?”

Natalie stepped over to Nick’s chair and wrapped her arms around his shoulders as he wept for a woman whom he had once loved and inadvertently betrayed, who had fascinated him, hated him and, eventually, forgiven him. Natalie pressed her cheek to his.

When the storm had passed, Natalie sat down again, holding both of Nick’s hands in both of hers. As she wondered how to introduce the subject of what this meant for the cure’s reversal, Nick did it himself.

“So it wasn’t my disease or my medications.”

“No.”

“And if mithridate simply wore off with time, Serena couldn’t have been first.”

“Maybe it metabolizes faster in women, or is affected by pregnancy, or menopause, or goodness knows what. We don’t have the data.”

“No, just a hypothesis.” Nick squeezed her hands, released them and picked up his phone. “We’ve been calling Feliks’s personal and business numbers. Ever since what happened when Charles DuChamps was murdered, Feliks locks his devices and accounts so tightly that he defies the hacking resources of whole nations. Let me try Timothy.”

“Of course!” Natalie said with relief. Timothy knew nothing of Feliks’s vampiric past, but everything of his human present. They’d been married for, what, five years now? How time rushed by.

Natalie wondered whether time had dragged for Nick, when he’d had ‘all the time in the world,’ as she’d had engraved on that stupid watch that had been used to frame him just as he’d recovered his humanity. It had been such an inept frame, when Nick’s blood sample had necessarily ruled him out as a suspect. Almost as if Morris had expected to be able to sabotage Nick’s blood sample? Of course it would have been different if Nick had still been a vampire! Well, it was all water under the bridge. Or blood, thicker than water...

Natalie’s wandering thoughts raced home when she heard the creak of metal as Nick accidentally bent the patio table where he grasped the edge.

“Yes, absolutely, Timothy. We’ll let you know immediately if we hear anything at all.” Blood tears streamed freely down Nick’s cheeks again, but he succeeded in keeping them out of his voice. “No, I’m fine; don’t worry about me! It’s just the old allergy.”

Nick stared at his phone long after he’d tapped the icon to hang up.

Natalie didn’t want to hear that Feliks was gone, too. She didn’t want to think that her treatment’s failure could be responsible for two deaths on top of Nick’s misery. How could it be? The mithridate cure had been so clear, so complete! An unknown must have been introduced to upset the equilibrium. Some foreign substance, an environmental contaminant...

“I wanted to say that I’d pray for them,” Nick said. “Last week, I would have said it. Now— am I allowed?”

Human tears sparkled in Natalie’s vision. She wished that she could give him an answer he’d believe. But as Nick had once doubted _the_ Joan of Arc promising that his God would always welcome him back, even from vampirism, his mostly agnostic wife’s assurance wasn’t going to cut it.

“Timothy and the police think that Feliks is missing. He disappeared the day before I... Not a trace but his clothes and shoes in a little pile in his garden. Oh, and ash. A dusting of ash over his garden. Under the sun.” Nick swallowed. “Feliks loved to fly, you know. He missed it. It was the one thing he really...”

Natalie reached out for Nick’s hands again. He took hers gently in his. She could see that his thoughts were long ago and far away.

“More of my test results will come in tomorrow,” Natalie said, after a while. “It should go faster now that we have an idea what we’re looking for: a foreign substance, a neutralizer, an inhibitor—”

“A poison.”

Natalie suddenly became aware of the coiled power in Nick’s posture, the easy readiness to spring in any direction and subdue any obstacle. It wasn’t often that she looked through her professor husband and saw even the police officer he used to be, but, right now, she felt like she could see all the way back to the belted knight deploying armed men across scorching middle eastern sands.

“An enemy,” Nick concluded.


	8. Run Before the Clock

“Just a sec!” Natalie called, almost running into Nick as they both rushed to answer the front door. Nick, coming from their bedroom, had his robe over his pajamas; Natalie, from the guestroom, wore just her nightshirt and slippers. Neither had wanted the vampire waking in strange surroundings, or with blood flowing within reach.

“I’ll get it,” Natalie began, meaning to caution Nick against the dawning sun. Instead, Nick held a finger to his lips and raised his eyebrows. Natalie suddenly remembered that they were under a kind of siege. Someone had not only sabotaged the cure, committing serial manslaughter at the very least, but had done so as if waving a red flag in front of the Enforcer bull.

Serena, Feliks and Nick weren’t the only victims, it turned out. Once they had known what they were looking for, Natalie and Nick had searched up missing persons reports, spontaneous human combustion claims, inhuman murders, and general news of the weird in the close vicinity of most of her few patients. It went back months. Nick was the most recent, one of just three known survivors — Urs was still unaccounted for — and Natalie could almost see the survivor’s guilt overtaking him.

“Lifestyle prejudice,” Nick had cracked when Natalie had tried to puzzle out the saboteur’s motive. Natalie understood why Janette, specifically, wanted Nick, specifically, to be a vampire again, but who cared about recovered vampires as a class? It couldn’t be the Enforcers; this defied their secrecy mandate. Some sort of vampire fundamentalist who thought the rules didn’t apply to him?

The polite bursts of knocking turned into unbroken pounding.

Nick led the way to the door. He seemed to make a token check of the cracks around the frame and the sharp angle out the window for clues, but he quickly dropped back and signaled for Natalie to check the peephole. The rising sun hadn’t yet hit the tiny lens, but it would soon.

Natalie stood on her toes and leaned in. Through the convex distortion, she saw a blonde woman, perhaps forty-ish, wearing beige slacks and a rose suede jacket over a white blouse. Only when the woman looked straight at the peephole did Natalie recognize… “Urs!”

As soon as Natalie turned the handle, Urs pushed in, minutes ahead of the sun. Natalie closed the door and let Nick nudge her behind him, placing himself between her and, potentially, another vampire. Did Nick know whether Urs was a vampire or human now? Did he listen for a heartbeat, smell the living blood, or was there a sixth sense? He’d never told her.

They hadn’t seen Urs since the year after the fever. She looked healthy and strong now, fitter even than she had then, though the melting away of some of her soft curves had left surprisingly hard planes. And Natalie found it difficult not to notice the crows’ feet and forehead furrows where she’d last seen the smooth skin of an eternal eighteen-year-old.

“You, too?” Urs stared at Nick. “Did it just wear off, after all?”

“Yeah,” Nick admitted.”I’m a vampire again, too.”

“But no,” Natalie said, “it didn’t just wear off. I think we’ve all got some catching up to do.”

“Oh. My. Well.” Urs looked around the living room. “May I sit down? It seems like I’ve been running for… forever.”

“Be our guest,” Natalie said. Urs sat on the couch. Natalie took an overstuffed armchair and Nick leaned on its back.

“I couldn’t think where else to go.” Urs spread her hands. Natalie remembered that Urs had lost all the vampires close to her during the fever; that desolation had been what had brought her to them, then, hinting that she’d heard of the way back across. Urs said, “I couldn’t call in advance because I had to ditch my phone. Phones can be tracked, you know.”

Gently, Nick asked, “When did you last feed?”

“Last night. The old ways kind of, well... they come back, don’t they?”

Natalie felt Nick’s hand clench against her shoulder. She reached up to lay her hand over it. Let sleeping dogs lie, for now. “We’re just happy that you’re all right, Urs. We’ve been trying to reach you. Someone has been hunting down each of the vampires who became human again and slipping them an antagonist to the mithridate.”

“Most of us died,” Nick said, “reverting in the sun.”

“That could have happened, couldn’t it?” Urs looked surprised. “Maybe that would have been better. I, um, I wasn’t in the sun. I was home in Nashville. In bed. With my boyfriend. David.” She lifted her hand to cover her mouth, and she closed her eyes. After a bit, Urs gathered herself again and said, “I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t think. After, I hid the body the way Screed taught me. And then I ran, the way Vachon showed me. One thing I really know how to do is run.”

“I understand,” Nick said. “I’m sorry. We’re so sorry.”

“I guess it happens to every vampire before you learn not to be with anyone you care about, right? I knew better. But then I wasn’t a vampire for so long, and then I was again, all at once.” Urs looked at where Nick and Natalie’s hands touched and then raised her eyes to Nick. “ _Could_ I have stopped? Do you have a way?”

Natalie couldn’t see Nick’s face from where she sat, but she saw Urs’s expression fall in on itself, both crushed and excused.

“We think that the mithridate can work again,” Natalie explained, “if we can identify and eliminate the antagonist. I can’t make any promises, but we’re working for a cure again.”

“Oh! Um, would I have to take it?”

“If you want to be human—”

Urs folded her hands in her lap, and then unfolded them and looked at them as if they didn’t quite make a pair.

“You want to stay a vampire?”

“Do I get the choice? I think— maybe, living without love, without getting any older, could be better than trying to find love again, with my body wearing out all around me every day. When I came to you after Screed and Vachon and everyone died, I didn’t know what it was like to be twenty, never mind forty. I didn’t know that I would run out of time to have children while trying to build my singing career, and then be seen as too old for the stage. If I’m just never with anyone I care about ever again—”

“What about those you don’t care about?” Nick’s voice emptied out. “Do they deserve to die?”

“Of course not! I’ve never taken death lightly, Nick.” Urs wound her hands together again. “This is the twenty-first century. There are alternatives. That’s why we all cluster around people like your friend Janette. I could even— I could do animal blood, really I could! I’m not ashamed to be thought a carouche.”

“It’s okay,” Natalie soothed. “Whatever you want, we’re on your side.”

Urs smiled the same grateful, wistful smile that Natalie remembered. “But I guess there’s someone who’s not on our side, huh? Who is it? What does he want?”

Nick grimaced. “We were hoping you might know.”

“Do you remember eating or drinking anything odd before you reverted, Urs? Maybe a new medicine, vitamin, free sample? Even a cream or soap?”

“David always got our groceries,” Urs said. “No, no I have no idea. Do you, Nick?”

“I take — took — a lot of medicine. It would have been child’s play to substitute some capsules or tablets.”

Urs’s eyes widened, and Natalie felt that Urs was only just now seeing them as they were, and not as she had remembered them. Twenty years of living left traces. Traces like an elephant’s foot through a thatched roof, Natalie thought. Weight and wrinkles. Stiff joints and sore backs. Chronic, progressive, degenerative, auto-immune disorders that sliced a decade off the average lifespan… As a human, Natalie had no option but to make the best she could of the human condition, including aging, disease and death. But Urs and Nick had been handed a fresh start on the other side, without the burdens of living “masters” or having to survive apart from butchers and blood banks! Yet still, Natalie admitted, with the burdens of the hunger, the Enforcers, and whatever hidden hand had turned their lives upside down.

“What can I do to help?” Urs asked.

Natalie brightened. Data beckoned. “I have some tests.”


	9. Welcome Such a Guest

“Let me show you!” Joan dragged one of the patio chairs into the yard so that Nick could better watch her demonstrate a drill her fencing coach had introduced that afternoon.

Obligingly, using his cane, Nick followed her to her imaginary _piste_. He adjusted his glasses and pronounced the full moon sufficient light. “You shouldn’t watch your opponent’s blade, anyway,” he reminded Joan. “It’s the shoulder that gives away an attack, unless you — good! That’s right; don’t lean!”

“You thinking an athletic scholarship there?” Schanke asked, joining Natalie, with her lantern and research notes, at the patio table.

“That would be nice! Mostly, we just want her to have fun and exercise. Some of the parents get really pushy about winning; it’s too much stress for the kids.”

“Don’t I remember! When Jenny’s field hockey team won the provincial—” Schanke accepted a can of Diet Coke. “No beer, huh?”

“Nick can’t these days,” Natalie closed her notebook, “and I need a clear head. It’s like never quite being off duty.”

“Understood.” Schanke dropped his voice. “How’s it going with the science? Any leads I can follow for you out in the real world, with or without the booga-booga stuff?”

“None yet, Schank. Thank you, though.” Natalie pushed back her chair with a sigh.

She looked at him fondly; of them all, Don Schanke seemed to have changed the least in the past two decades. A little more bald, a little more pudgy, but that could be the same windbreaker he’d worn at the police picnic when Schanke’s Scorchers had batted a shut-out, back when they’d had to tease Nick into coming down after sunset. And Schanke was still one of the best friends anyone could ever ask. Natalie couldn’t imagine what Nick would have done without him.

Natalie crossed her arms. “My test results and experimental consults are piling up so high that one of my team members actually volunteered to bring me my interoffice mail on her way home from a late meeting tonight. With the two sets of samples, Nick and Urs’s, I’ve been able to isolate the common foreign substance — substances, really. Twenty-eight, for crying out loud. Some of the inert components resemble ingredients of solar kyphi and Lydovuterine-B. It’s the others that invert the whole effect. It’s driving me nuts, like there’s something I just can’t quite remember.”

“Twenty-eight pieces, whew!” Schanke shook his head. “You’ll get ‘em, Nat.”

“At least it’s not as bad as solar kyphi’s thirty-six.” Her grin felt a little maniacal. Natalie counted eight ingredients on her Diet Coke nutrition label. Not so bad at all. “I’m pretty sure that a double-dose of solar kyphi will overwhelm this stuff and reset Nick’s system, if he goes blood-free again first. But I have to be sure. I have to know where this inhibitor is coming from and that there absolutely won’t be any more.”

“How much solar kyphi is left?” Schanke’s investigative instincts zoomed in.

“Seven regular doses.” Natalie had never been able to synthesize more solar kyphi. She knew every molecule of the compound, but whether it had to steep for a few thousand years in the tomb of Osiris to become potent or what, the stock was perilously finite. “About enough for lab testing and three restored cures.”

“How many patients you got?”

“Four.” Natalie covered her face with her hands for a moment. “But Urs doesn’t want it — she went off to find a guy named Aristotle; Nick won’t tell me whether he’s _the_ Aristotle — so I guess that’s lucky. We’ve got exactly enough to go around. If we can eliminate the source of the inhibitor, that is, because there’s not going to be a third time here.”

“Have you, uh,” Schanke looked around and dropped his voice even lower. “I know you’ve eliminated ‘those who protect the secret’ and all that jazz from being the cause of this. Not their style, got it. So how about their enemies, rivals? These guys kind of rule the vampires, right? So who else wants that gig?”

Natalie checked that Joan’s demonstration was still going strong. Nick seemed to be illustrating something with his cane, from his chair; they’d told Joan that Nick had fenced when he was younger, just not with what he’d fenced. Natalie whispered back, “Nick says that all the vampires fear and resent the Enforcers, but that they’re a necessary evil. What would happen if the secret really did get out? Anarchy? Inquisitions? War?”

“Talk about a new world order,” Schanke agreed. “But — and I really hate to bring it up, and just tell me if I’m overstepping my bounds, but Nick and you have both been known to chop off your nose to spite your face from time to time, so—” 

“Out with it, Schank.”

He took a deep breath and held her eyes. “Have you even considered Lacroix?”

“Lacroix’s been dead for almost a quarter of a century.” Natalie blinked. “He’s that soot stain on Nick’s old loft door, remember?”

Now Schanke blinked. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Don’t know _what_?”

The front doorbell rang. Joan sang out, “We’re around back!” as if everything were normal. The adults looked at each other in panic and stood. Nick forgot to use his cane as he rose.

Doctor Lakshmi Plante came through the side gate balancing an armful of manila folders and interoffice envelopes in front of a plain black suit; even her tote handbag over one shoulder showed more files poking out its top. Joan saluted Nick with her foil and then ran to offer the strange adult some help, and not coincidentally poke through the files.

“Thank you, Lakshmi,” Natalie accepted the paperwork piles from her employee and her daughter, with a raised eyebrow for the daughter. “You’ve met Nick and Joan. This is our friend, Don Schanke.”

“The police captain!” Lakshmi exclaimed. Natalie wondered when she’d mentioned Schanke and his profession to her team. Lakshmi’s memory for these things was phenomenal. “It’s very nice to meet you.” They shook hands. Then she crossed to Nick. “And Professor Knight — Nick! You’re looking… well?”

Nick leaned on his cane with one hand while he shook hers with the other. “Not quite well enough to spare Natalie back to your team full time, I’m afraid.”

Lakshmi laughed, holding Nick’s hand longer than called for. “I know that not all this paperwork is for the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, but if she wins the Nobel Prize for a sideline in auto-immune disorders, no one is going to complain, right? I understand that your photic allergy has returned! Do I remember correctly that it’s an atypical subtype of xeroderma pigmentosum?” She spread her hands apologetically. “I’m sure you know how doctors get in the presence of really rare conditions.”

“I may have run into that.” Nick grinned at Natalie.

“Oh! Lakshmi exclaimed, swinging her handbag off her shoulder. “I almost forgot the files in here. Whoops!” The files and everything else fell out over the lawn at Nick’s feet. Everyone started toward her to help, but Lakshmi waved them off. “No, no, I’ve got it! ” She got down on her knees and began sorting the paperwork, while the miscellaneous purse contents seemed to spiral out even wider.

Nick started to bend down to help. Natalie coughed pointedly and gave him a sharp look, warning him to keep up his pretense of the chronic pain and muscle weakness that would doubtless return with the humanity he was determined to regain. All she got in return was a helpless shrug and a slower descent, more heavily leaning on the cane; ill, well or immortal, Nick’s fundamental chivalry wouldn’t let him ignore a guest’s plight.

Joan jumped to help as soon as she saw Nick in motion. Natalie sighed; she and Schanke both headed for the spill, then, as well.

“Oh, no need, Professor Knight!” Lakshmi said, leaping to her feet with something in her hands. “Please, let me help you back to your chair!” She grasped Nick’s free hand between both of hers, pressing an object into his palm.

Nick’s hand erupted in flames. He howled and regained his feet, ripping free and reeling back. He dropped his cane and caught up his scorched hand with his whole one.

An ordinary, dime-a-dozen, plastic rosary fell to the ground, unscathed.

Natalie saw Nick’s eyes golden through his glasses, his fangs sharp through his grimace of pain. “Schanke, get Joan out of here!”

“A little late for that, isn’t it, Doctor Lambert? Or would that be Doctor Knight?” came a voice from nowhere. “And Detective — Captain — Schanke; how ... good ... to see you again.”

Out of the night, Nick’s nemesis and Natalie’s nightmare landed in their yard. Natalie had never really seen him before, but it was impossible to misidentify the tall presence in the black suit and lurid platinum hair, especially when he turned to reveal a vampire’s visage.

Lacroix was back.


	10. Think on Him Together

Lacroix. Alive. Undead. Whatever.

The bottom dropped out of Natalie’s world again, pitching her back through time. But now it wasn’t her own memories overwhelming her; it was Nick’s stories, what he had told her, and where he had stopped himself from telling her more. There was what Lacroix had done to Nick, to bend him to his will through the centuries. There were the holes in those same stories where Janette too obviously belonged, her suffering something Nick didn’t consider his to tell. So many of Nick’s human friends had fallen to Lacroix, not even for vampiric sustenance but for an inhuman pleasure, from a novice nun who had given Nick shelter to the archaeologist who had, all unknowing, left him his humanity in the solar kyphi… to Alyce Hunter, the museum curator, the night they’d thought that Nick had killed Lacroix… And so many uncounted other fellow human beings violated and thrown away by one who felt he had the right to bathe in their blood just because he was the stronger.

Just because he was a vampire.

“I shan’t apologize for missing the wedding, as I wasn’t invited.” Lacroix’s glance took in Joan. He arched an eyebrow. “Or the christening, for that matter.”

Nick snarled and stepped between Lacroix and his family. Schanke pushed Joan behind him back to the patio and pulled a gun from a holster Natalie hadn’t realized he’d been wearing. Neither Nick nor Schanke looked as shocked as Natalie felt at the return of an ancient evil she’d thought staked and smeared all these years. How long had they known? She cursed Nick’s habits from eight centuries of secrets and his misguided attempts to spare her. He’d never fully accepted that, when they’d married, he hadn’t set down his past, but she’d taken it up with him.

“I knew you still had it in you, Nicholas.” Lacroix’s lips curled. “Or, rather, that you could again have it in you.” He opened his arms and bowed elegantly to Lakshmi. “My dear, you have indeed succeeded. You have earned your reward. He is at last all that I wish him to be — and what I shall make you.”

“I do appreciate a puzzle.” Lakshmi laughed, a colder, deeper laugh than Natalie had ever heard from her. She strutted to Lacroix’s side. “What that one could do for a pathetic washout who couldn’t handle his immortality, I could surely undo for my own immortality.”

“Bait,” Nick spat at Lacroix. “You always know just what bait to dangle, don’t you? She doesn’t have a clue what she’s getting into!”

“Tsk-tsk, Nicholas. No longer do I bestow my eternal friendship on the unworthy, the unprepared. Any new companions must prove themselves in my regard. But neither do I withdraw my … devotion. I am, as I have always been, _your_ eternal teacher. And for this lesson, I have at last relieved you of this sham of a mortal life. As I told you I would when last we met face to face.” Lacroix clenched his hand into a fist, and then opened it as if to let something broken fall away. “I give you one more chance.”

“How?” Natalie snapped. She had a thousand questions, but that was the one that would matter most if they survived. “How did she reverse the cure?”

“Don’t you know yet?” Lakshmi tossed back her head to look up at the full moon. “Perhaps I was premature, after all. It’s so obvious on your test results that I was sure you’d put it together by now. All twenty-eight ingredients.”

“Oh, my.” Natalie realized. She caught Nick’s golden eyes. “Oh, of course.”

Joan whispered to Schanke, “Is this for real?”

“As real as it gets, kiddo. You get a chance, you run to your Aunt Janette, capische?”

“Lunar kyphi,” Nick breathed, sharing Natalie’s gaze. He seemed to shake off the vampire; he looked human again. “Where on earth did you find lunar kyphi? It should have been in a shrine to Set in a certain tomb in the Valley of the Kings, but—”

“Enough!’ Lacroix barked, red swirling into his golden gaze. “It is done. The last time that I offered you this chance, Nicholas, when I graciously moved to restore you by my own bite and blood, you threatened to choose the Light in the place between life and death. You threatened to substitute your will for mine, to flout my right to reclaim what I had made!”

“What you made was a mistake.”

“What I made was _you_! Will you do it now, Nicholas? Will you choose death outside the shelter of the Light? It took two decades, but, you see, I found you a path back to vampirism that does not lead through your so-called _choice_. The only choice you get is the one I give you. My supply of lunar kyphi outstrips yours of solar kyphi. Checkmate.”

“Hey, buster, let it go.” Schanke said, his gunsights on Lacroix’s face. Natalie approved; a bullet might pass right through a vampire with minimal damage in most places, but a head wound? That could count. “We went over this at that warehouse by the docks back in the day. Nick didn’t go with you when you framed him then, and he’s not going with you now that you’ve poisoned him. Seriously, man, have you ever considered flowers and chocolates?”

“Gifts, indeed. One would think that I had given him enough gifts, all of which he has thrown in my face!” Lacroix stepped forward. Schanke, Joan and Natalie all backed toward the back door of the house. “But you have a point. No one values family more than I do. I would not rob you of your chosen companions, Nicholas, any more than I will permit you to rob me of mine. Shall I bring your wife across for you, now? And your lovely daughter?” Lacroix leered. “She has something of Fleur’s grace about her; have you noticed?”

Roaring, Nick launched himself at Lacroix. Natalie couldn’t see Nick’s face, but she assumed that he looked as much the vampire as he sounded. She hoped that all the bovine blood Nick had been drinking would be enough to withstand Lacroix, but she didn’t dare trust that it could be sufficient to defeat such power.

Suddenly, Natalie found the broken rake shaft in her hand. “Joan!” she hissed, passing her daughter what amounted to a giant wooden stake. If Lacroix got through Nick, Schanke and Natalie, at least Joan knew what to do with pointy sticks. Thank goodness real vampires were more vulnerable than the sparkly ones in those books and movies. “Wood through the heart. Beheading. Fire. Sun.”

“Got it,” Joan whispered back.

If they got out of this, Natalie promised herself, she would stop keeping important things — like, say, the existence of vampires — from her daughter, the same as she would make Nick stop keeping important things — like, oh, Lacroix’s survival — from her.

Schanke’s gun fired.

Lacroix staggered back, blood gushing from one eye.

“Dad!” Joan tossed him the rake handle.

Nick caught it, brought his arm into line and lunged. He drove the wood through Lacroix’s dead heart.

“Nicholas—” Lacroix staggered back and fell on the scattered contents of Lakshmi’s purse, including the cheap trinket rosary that she had pressed to Nick’s skin to reveal his vampirism. Wounded, Lacroix screamed as he burst into flames. What had scorched Nick incinerated Lacroix. The fire burned supernaturally high, miraculously hot. An ethereal radiance burst around him. Everyone but Nick stepped back.

In an instant, Lacroix was gone.

Nick fell to his knees by the dusting of uncanny ashes on the lawn.

Joan burrowed into Natalie’s arms. Natalie heard Lakshmi wail and run, and she heard Schanke take off after her.

“No, Schank,” Nick said without getting up or looking around. “Don’t worry about her.”

“What are you talking about?” Schanke returned to the patio. “Maybe he was the mastermind, but she’s definitely the chief flunky. She’s the one who poisoned you and your friends. She’s the one who knows where that lunar kyphi stuff is, for crying out loud!”

“She’s running straight into the Enforcers’ net. Tomorrow night, I’ll ask Janette to confirm. I … I have to tell her about all this, anyway,” Nick said, still staring at Lacroix’s last shadow on the grass. “He never intended to keep Doctor Plante after bringing her across, or he wouldn’t have let her leave such a wide trail. The Enforcers would have gotten rid of her as soon as she’d served his purpose. She would have been his offering to them. Bait and switch was always his way. The letter of the contract, not the spirit.”

“Be that as it may, we’re gonna hear some sirens any minute now, people, and I have this gunshot to explain.”

“Tell the truth. Leave out the bit about vampires.”

“Right. Easy. What was I worried about? You always did stick me with the paperwork, partner.” Schanke patted Nick’s shoulder; Nick covered Schanke’s hand with his own. “I’m sorry, man. I know there was — history.” Then Schanke went around front to answer to Toronto’s finest.

Natalie and Joan walked to Nick together and then each sat down on one side of him. Natalie saw that Nick’s expression was numb, almost blank; if vampires could go into shock, he was in it now. Joan leaned against his shoulder.

Nick hugged his and Natalie’s daughter fiercely to himself and laid his head on top of hers.


	11. Lay Down a Life

“Seriously?” Natalie asked. “You’re seriously going to carry me over the threshold into our own house now, when you didn’t into the hotel room on our wedding night?”

“I didn’t have vampire strength on our wedding night, did I?” Grinning, Nick swept Natalie up into his arms. Her green evening gown billowed around her legs below her coat, though not nearly as much as when he’d taken her flying after dinner and before dancing. The flight had been astonishing and the dancing divine, but eating mostly by herself, as Nick miserably forced down what morsels he could, had tugged her heartstrings. And that’s what this was really all about, after all.

Nick set Natalie on her own feet and closed the door behind them.

Natalie turned a lamp on and tilted her face up. “Joan is staying over at Hannah’s, remember.”

Nick supplied the invited kiss, and several more besides. “Then she’s definitely still awake, probably watching some terrible movie—”

“Without you nitpicking everything in it?” Natalie grinned. “Yeah, I can’t imagine why she prefers watching with people who don’t do that.”

“You’d think she’d be used to it.” Nick shook his head in mock bewilderment and hung up their coats in the hall closet.

It had been almost three months since Lacroix’s death in their back yard and Lakshmi’s disappearance that same night. Nick still retreated into brooding silences under blasting music too often for Natalie not to worry, but he never failed to come out of those fits of grief and guilt for Joan, and the spells did seem to be slowly drifting farther apart and fewer between. Who was she to tell him how to mourn? Natalie reminded herself. Nick had more practice with loss and regret than any heart had been built to endure. It was less a wonder that other vampires were as they were than that Nick was her Nick.

Janette had eventually confirmed to Nick that Lacroix’s last pet had fallen to the Enforcers, and that Lacroix had ferreted out Natalie’s patients by his usual expedients of hypnotism, torture and reading his children’s minds. If Janette had been forced or suborned into any role in Lacroix’s scheme, the fact didn’t come back to Natalie, who had recognized the better part of valor in leaving Janette entirely to Nick, no questions asked. Schanke had found the private lab where Lakshmi had analyzed the lunar kyphi and tested it on blood and tissue samples wrested from Natalie’s vampire patients, who had fatally become Lakshmi’s involuntary experimental subjects in her calibrations to ensure that Nick’s transformation would come out exactly as Lacroix required.

No one had yet found Lacroix’s boasted cache of lunar kyphi.

Natalie swirled away from Nick for the fun of spinning out her flaring hem, and won an impromptu dance across the living room, around the coffee table. It was like going back in time to one of the commissioner’s dinner dance events or museum fundraisers that they’d attended back when Detective Nick Knight had reported to Captain Joe Stonetree and Medical Examiner Natalie Lambert had depended on Forensic Technician Grace Balthazar, when they’d been working for the cure and hoping for what might come on its other side. If she closed her eyes, they were both again young and invincible… or certain approximations thereof.

“Shall I name the elephant in the room?” Natalie asked, playing with Nick’s tuxedo’s bow tie. “As much as I would love to take you upstairs and peel this off, I don’t want to wake up dead, so tonight is going to end on the couch in front of _King Kong_ or something, just like… before.”

Nick lifted her hands away from his tie and kissed each in turn.

“Point taken!” Natalie sighed grumpily and went to sit on the couch. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes. Nick came to sit next to her and she curled up into his side. “Are you sure? Really, really, really, absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure? You don’t want to wait until there are better treatments for that blasted disease, maybe even a cure? Or to see whether I can do something better with Lydovuterine-B using today’s technology? Because I can live without sex, Nick! I can live in the dark, and I can live with the cow blood, and I can even live with Janette being—”

“Hey,” Nick kissed Natalie’s forehead. “It’s okay. I know. You are brave enough for anything.”

“Am I being selfish?”

“No! Okay, maybe we both are, but just a little,” Nick said. “You don’t want me to be in constant, progressively worsening pain. Good. Me, neither. And maybe, somewhere deep and buried, you can’t stand that it’s probably all a long, slow downhill from here. It’s not likely to be pretty.”

“No, Nick—”

“It would be very human if you did.” Nick stroked her hand. “Now, on this side—” He paused.

Natalie looked up, saw fangs and yelped. He grinned. She frowned daggers at him and twisted to face him on the couch.

Nick put away his fangs and his expression sobered. “I don’t want to _want to_ kill you. Or anyone else. I don’t think that I can carry the hunger another eternity.”

Nick’s words sank into a thick silence. Natalie blinked and dropped her eyes.

Nick continued, a little more lightly, “I do want to have sex in my life again — with you, with or without the blue pill — and sunlight, and food, and sacraments... And I’m afraid of being the one who has to watch you die — and then watch Joan die. I’m afraid of not getting to grow old with you and understand and share that for you. I’m afraid of not ever getting to walk into that Light with the door open for me.”

“No fair. You know I’m not going to deny you what you think is your salvation.”

“So are _you_ sure, Nat? Really, absolutely, one-hundred-percent? At dawn, I take the very last dose of mithridate, made with the very last measure of solar kyphi. I was the first modern vampire to be cured; now I’ll be the last, too.”

Natalie pulled Nick’s hand up to her heart and leaned her ear against his chest. “What if there really is more lunar kyphi? What if the Enforcers or one of your ‘lifestyle prejudice’ rogue’s gallery digs it up and slips it into your coffee?”

“Then either I’ll go up in flames in the sun, or we’ll find more solar kyphi, or another cure, somehow, won’t we? We can’t live in the ‘what-if’s. Any of us can die at any time.” He fell silent, and Natalie knew that they were each scrolling through their own lists of their dead. Her parents, grandmother, brother, goddaughter, Cal, Lora… if her dead overwhelmed her, sometimes, what must Nick’s do to him? “This is the life I choose, Nat, here with you and Joan. It’s worth it. You’re worth it. Every bit.”

Natalie breathed out. Consciously, carefully, she let go her fears, and let her husband be the man she loved. “Want to run any marathons or climb any mountains on your last night as a vampire?”

“I’ll take as many more dances as you’ve got.”

“How about... one more flight?”

Nick’s smile spread across his face, unhurried yet intent. “You should have told me you wanted to go flying back when I was a vampire the first time. I had no idea.”

“I didn’t think it was something I had to say!” Natalie thumped his shoulder. “And we were trying to get you to drop the vampiric behaviors. Besides, I thought it was, you know, kind of an intimate thing to ask.”

“It can be,” Nick’s arch grin was all too kissable. “Come on.” He stood and offered her his hand.

As Natalie put her shoes back on and Nick opened the closet for their coats, someone knocked on the front door. Nick went to answer it. Natalie checked her phone, in case she’d missed Joan trying to reach them.

“Urs!” Nick exclaimed. “Come in.”

“Thanks, Nick. Hi, Natalie.” Except for her clothes, which had changed with the seasons, Urs looked the same as she had three months ago, as any vampire would — as Nick did. But her expression was determined now, no longer lost and afraid. “Oh, are you going out? You look lovely.”

“We’re in for the night,” Natalie said, with a wry look just for Nick. “And our daughter is out. Do you need a place to stay? Or some blood?”

“No blood! Thank you.” Urs nodded firmly. She took a deep breath. “I, um— I’m back for the mithridate. You were right, Nick. You’re right about all of it. The _hunger_ … you know? The way it’s always, always there, and you don’t dare get close, can’t even let yourself feel—” Urs looked from Nick to Natalie and back. “It’s okay that I changed my mind, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Urs.” Natalie’s heart was in her throat.

Nick took Natalie’s left hand in his and met her eyes.

“No!” Natalie warned. She knew him. She knew that look. “Nick—”

The two rings slid together with a tiny click.

“Yes, Urs, it’s okay,” Nick said at last. “You’re doing the right thing. You deserve your humanity.”

Natalie’s vision blurred with tears.

“Hey, did you know that the new Tesla has more trunk space than any other car on the market today?”

 

**— end —**

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Forever Knight_. Please don’t mistake it for anything else. (Kyphi actually existed. Vampires never did.)
> 
> **Beta-reading.** Thank you, Last_Scorpion for checking my wording and catching my typos! Thank you very much!
> 
> **Inspiration.** In the 2015 FKFicFest game, Melissa, who identifies as a “Dark N &Ner,” noted that she likes AUs and mythology, and prompted (pairing) “ _Please don't argue. You have to leave right now—you're not safe here._ ” plus (gen) “ _Better to live on beggar's bread/With those we love alive,/Than taste their blood in rich feasts spread,/And guiltily survive!_ ” Together, these dug out of my memory a fragment of a story idea that Leela and I worked out on a road trip long ago, in which a cure wore off. Thanks, Melissa, for the prompt! Thanks, Leela, for the idea!
> 
> **Research/Reality.** [Mithridate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridate), solar and lunar [kyphi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyphi) and [vetāla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetala) are all “real” mythological things, freely adapted here. Flooding by the [Old Aswan Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Low_Dam) is a real historical thing. And Teslas do have astonishing trunk space (here’s [a tall man squeezing into the front trunk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMGWkYVtm8), [all that fits into the back trunk](http://dauger.com/tesla/cargo.html), and [the biggest trunks of 2015](http://www.autobytel.com/sedans/car-buying-guides/10-cars-with-the-biggest-trunks-for-2015-126637/)). Nick’s unnamed disease in this story is loosely based on Multiple Sclerosis, which too many people I love have.
> 
> **Canon.** This story diverges from canon during the hiatus, the eighteen months between season one and season two. Subsequent history runs parallel (for example, Lacroix frames Nick and the fever kills Screed) but alternate (for example, without Nick, Schanke doesn’t catch Dollard and so isn’t on the plane with Cohen). Of course Lili and _The Abarat_ come from “1966,” the Enforcers from “Unreality TV,” Lacroix planting Nick’s watch from “Killer Instinct,” Serena from “Baby, Baby,” Feliks from “Blood Money,” Joan of Arc from “For I Have Sinned,” Natalie’s brother Richard from “I Will Repay,” the Valley of the Kings from “Ashes to Ashes,” the place between life and death and the door to the Light from “Near Death,” etc.
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Please let me know what you think.


End file.
